FPS plummets when lights are involved.
FPS plummets when lights are involved.
Specs:
CPU - AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ Stock @ 3.4GHz
GPU - AMD Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 - 13.2 Beta Drivers
RAM - 8GB DDR3 1600MHz
Mobo - Asrock M3N78D
The problem is that bright lights significantly decrease your FPS in Oblivion. Specifically, when you introduce light sources like torches or are in areas with multiple lights (such as the Fighters Guild), your frame rate drops dramatically. Lowering the resolution of shadows provides a small increase, and enabling “bUseHighQualityLighting=1” in Oblivion.ini also improves performance by 3-4 FPS. Outdoor scenes maintain a consistent frame rate, but indoor areas with lighting issues suffer from significant FPS dips.
Well its been a while but from what I can remember the best thing to do is use Bloom lighting instead of HDR lighting
Have you read this
http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_7.html
Your GPU is pretty weak for Oblivion if I'm honest, the game is very graphically challenging.
Things like reflections and shadow settings as well as draw distance settings make a big differance.
Let me know how you go I can fire it up again if you need more help.
The settings don’t make any difference. I actually get lower FPS when I disable shadows entirely.
I also experience no difference with bloom/hdr enabled/disabled, nor do I get any difference when I change my resolution. I get the exact same framerates with 640x480 as I do with 1152x864.
Changing the settings (draw distance, texture detail, etc.) make no difference on framerates.
I mean, with everything aside from AA maxed out, I'm getting a minimum of 54fps out in the 'exterior'. In the interiors/towns, I’m getting severe fps drops, which I have found to be due to the lighting.
I’ve also found that typing ‘slp 1’ in the console changes the lighting system to no longer draw shadows. Using that command nets me 3-4 fps.
Skyrim/Fallout 3/Fallout NV play fine, a steady 40fps throughout with similar/higher settings.
I must admit this is very strange as your symptoms suggest a hardware restriction yet when you turn effects down you get no gain or very little. Your GPU is the weakest thing in your system yet it should be dropping FPS harder than you are suggesting if it is actually the reason for the issue.
So that leads me to V-Sync. Do you have it on ? If you do it is possible that it is what is causing the issue. V-sync will restrict FPS to integers of the actual refresh rate if the hardware can not maintain the same FPS as the refresh rate.
So if you have your refresh rate at 60 and V-sync on it will cause drops sometimes large ones if the hardware cant maintain 60FPS.
Here’s the rewritten text:
VSync is off. Otherwise, I'd be getting 60/30/15 fps, not 52, 43, etc, and I'd have no screen-tearing. Yeah, Oblivion has never run well on my computer, XP or 7. It’s just THIS time, I'm getting framerates above 30 when outside, so I'd like to get this problem ‘fixed’.
Oblivion running smoothly, with frame rates above 30fps outside, due to a fix involving V-sync and potential driver/hardware compatibility issues. Exploring AMD hardware for comparison regarding lighting performance.
I had this same problem and I (pretty much) fixed it -- after a lot of testing. Go into the Oblivion.ini in My Documents/My Games/Oblivion and set
'bDoSpecularPass=0' (default is 1). It seems that the specular pass is what is giving it a problem -- which makes sense as this is the light pass. Doing this brought my low framerate near fires and other light sources up to about 20 -- not perfect, but certainly better than an abysmal 6. Hope this helps!!